Jackass! 2005.0 Development [ ok ]

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

Greetings Jackass! team members. Newsflash: we're on deck over at DistroWatch:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20050627#waiting

Wow. Hopefully they don't get the wrong idea and call the project a distribution or subdistribution or anything like that; too early to tell right now, as the spot is only a preview of the next DistroWatch newsletter. So far, they seem to have it right, with the project summary yanked right from the front page of our site, to which they provide a link.

More publicity, me lads, ahoy!

Bob P · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2005 10:18 pm Post subject:

yes, traffic on the Jackass! webserver has been quieting down a bit over the past month. it was lookling like we were going to have fewer users in June than we had in May, even though May wasn't a full month for us. to spur some interest in the project, i sent an email to distrowatch over the weekend.

yesterday, we were at the bottom of their Related Links page, with one click through to the Jackass! server -- that was presumably a test by the web page's author.

today its nice to see that we've made it to their Weekly Newsletter and appear to have leapfrogged over alot of distros and made it to their waiting list. The Distrowatch Weekly Newsletter seems to have brought quite a few new users to the website. our unique user count for today looks like it will be about 4x as high as the busiest day we've had in the past 2 months. it seems that Jackass! has been a well-kept secret.
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Stage 1/3 | Jackass! | Rockhopper! | Thanks | Google Sucks

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

Ah, right on then. So, in the future, will we likely end up on the "projects frequently mistaken for Linux distributions" section? I would think at least that would be likely.

Good job stirring up interest--hmm, I wonder how we could get mentioned by NewsForge or Linux.com ...

neo_phani · n00b Joined: 01 Sep 2004 Posts: 67

Anyone tried JackAss on Dell 700 m ? Any details would be helpful

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

This is NOT the thread to be asking for that!

Look, Jackass! behaves just like a normal Stage 3 tarball. If you can do a regular Gentoo Stage 3 installation on your Dell machine, you should be able to install Jackass! without any problems.

Bob P · Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 8:00 pm Post subject:

a couple of things have come up that i've wanted to talk about:

1. Gentoo 2005.1.

Can anyone point me to the place that I can go to get up to speed on what will be included in the 2005.1 release of Gentoo? I'd like to find out what's on the table for the next release, to see if we need to do any planning at our end.

2. Stage 1/3 and Jackass! Download Update.

I've reviewed the server logs, and as of the end of June 2005 it looks like we've had about 100,000 people perform the Stage 1/3 Guide so far, and it looks like we've had about 10,000 people download Jackass! It seems that the projects are fairly popular, as quite a few people seem to be using them.

3. Feedback on the Stage 1/3 Guides and The Jackass! Project

For the Stage 1/3 Guide, I've had a total of 12 people respond to the project by sending me an e-mail to say, "Thanks" for the project. I haven't received any e-mails about Jackass!, though we have had a number of people post "Thank You" messages in the Jackass! Support Group.

These numbers are rather low, though, so its been hard to get a good feel for how many people are actually using the Stage 1/3 Guide and/or the Jackass! CDs.

According to the Server Logs, we've had about 100,000 people download the Stage 1/3 PDF to date, and about 10,000 people download the Jackass! PDF to date. These are the only metrics that I have that allow me to estimate the number of Stage 1/3 and Jackass! users.

For the Stage 1/3 Guide, I've had a total of 3 people donate on the "Buy Me a Beer" program. One of them was nightmorph, a Jackass! tester. The other two were Stage 1/3 users. One person was kind enough to buy me an inexpensive book on my Amazon.com wish list. The fact that these people have done something while others haven't impresses me so much that I want to give them credit. The following people have made contributions in the name of the Stage 1/3 Guide:

Jeff McCoy - book
Tod Herman - donation
Nightmorph - beer
Clayton Tavernier - beer
Lee Thompson - beer

For The Jackass! Project, nobody's made a contribution to date. Well, I have to take that back. Jason Suggs was kind enough to send a bunch of old SDRAM memory chips in the mail, and I was able to find a pair that were compatible and installed them in the Jackass! Web Server to change its memory from 64 MB of EDO to 64 MB of SDRAM. (For those of you who aren't aware of it, the Jackass! Web Server runs on a K6-266 with 64 MB RAM and a 4 GB hard disk. Hardware donations are welcome).

Here is how the numbers break down for users who have made some form of donation:

Stage 1/3 install: 5 of 100,000 people, or 0.005% of the users.
Jackass! Project: 1 of 10,000 people, or 0.01% of the users.

The response rates are amazingly similar for both projects.

In addition to the donations mentioned above, for both the Stage 1/3 Guide AND the Jackass! Project, I've had a total of TWELVE people send an e-mail to say, "Thanks" for working on those projects.

Not that I'm complaining at all -- I did the Stage 1/3 Install Guides without any expectations, and we did Jackass! 2005.0 as a gift to the Gentoo community, and we weren't expecting anything in return. But I am really surprised by the fact that we've gotten so little feedback on these projects. I mean, we've had over 110,000 people use either Jackass! or the Stage 1/3 Guide, and only 12 of them have bothered to take the time to send an e-mail to say thanks. And only 5 out of 110,000 people have considered making a contriubtion. So I'm wondering if there are more than 17 people out there who are still using Jackass! or the Stage 1/3 install, or if its just human nature for users of a totally free distribution like Gentoo not to respond in any way.

I am not really bothered by this so much as I am surprised by it. Are these projects just not worth the trouble that we've spent on them, or are people in the Gentoo camp just not interested in showing support, even if it doesn't cost them anything? I don't know if this is typical for most Open Source Software projects, but if it is, it really makes me wonder how long the people who volunteer their time to working on OSS projects tend to stick with it -- especially the guys who are running servers that cost them money, or people who work on complex projects that require alot of time. I get the impression that if the feedback for most OSS projects is as sparse as it has been here, that most people would burn-out on the projects and just give up with them, as some of the other guys who make unofficial Gentoo Live CDs have recently done. This is really a pretty sad situation, because in the absense of help from a wider user base, only the bigger companies like SuSE and Mandriva (who cater to corporate clients) are going to have incentive to push toward making developments in this area. It seems that the hobbyist distributions may experience episodic pulses of creativity, but that consistency in development could be a real problem.

In some respects, it really makes me wonder about the future of OSS in general. :cry:

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Stage 1/3 | Jackass! | Rockhopper! | Thanks | Google Sucks

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

@Bob:

1. I found the releng page for Gentoo 2005.1. There are probably more pages available through a sitewide Google search I started.

2. I think a lot of the users of Jackass!, or the Stage 1/3 guides, don't necessarily understand all the time and effort it took to develop those projects.

But there's a new trend in the forums regardless. I look around at all the users, especially those completely new to Gentoo, and so many of them seem to be doing Stage 1/3 installs. A lesser percentage are also doing Jackass! installs. I see the support threads they post in Installation Help & other forums; they don't just post to the Jackass/Stage 1/3 help threads, surprisingly. All the threads begin with what's now a throwaway line: "Hi, I'm doing a stage 1/3 install and . . ."

Now, that's amazing. Though there hasn't been much feedback per se, in terms of appreciation or usefulness (if you ignore the raw statistics like how many Jackass! .isos have been downloaded), I think the entire course of Gentoo installations has been subtly altered. I noticed that there was a parallel increase in alternative installations besides a standard Gentoo install at the same time the Stage 1/3 guide hit. I did some forum searching, and interest in things like Knoppix/Gentoo installs was going up right at the same time the Stage 1/3 guide came out, so possibly the two increased interest in each other, or it might have just been coincidence.

But now, more than ever, new and current users are at least aware of successful alternative installation methods--even encouraged to try them out. I think the forums have done more for the visibility of such alternative methods than the few scattered references in the official Gentoo documentation pages.

Here's the end result: the Stage 1/3 Guide has practically become a household name. Jackass! is not quite at the same level of recognition, but mentions in GWN, DistroWatch, member signatures, word-of-mouth, and so on have certainly raised its visibility.

I hope you do find some encouragement in this, even if the beers are few and far in between. :wink:

Bob P · Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 11:57 pm Post subject:

Frodg · l33t Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 761

A quick note from my point of view on usage of Jackass.

I have been using Gentoo for over year and will not change...

I have found the Jackass page today as I was looking to use an old pIII 500 as a server and needed a faster/optimised install. So I will be using the Jackass CD when I get home tonight or tomorrow....

But the appeal of this project seems to be really for those doing fresh installs. My current Gentoo box works flawlessly and is updated every two or three days, so I am unlikely to be reinstalling - I would like to propose that a lot of people are like me... Interested in this (and other Gentoo) projects, but not willing to reinstall and lose all the additional programs that have been installed over the last year....

If you could figure out a way to upgrade to the Jackass optimised tarballs and configurations without losing the e17 windowmanager and all the other goodies I would use it. (Can't spend the week needed to recompile everything with emerge -e

)

And I would agree that I would normally put questions to the generalised forums because most of the problems relate to normal configuration of any Gentoo system not just Jackass. Once you install Gentoo you need the forums for configuration and setting up you desktop - so you naturally (if rudely) get deeply involved with that process and forget to take the time to thank the base system developers..
Am I making sense?
There is no lack of appreciation in this, just a need to get on and get working with your new system....

So even thought I have not used it yet, I cannot imagine having an OS as good as Gentoo ( and thereby Jackass) without the long hours of work by people such as yourselves. I lack the skills and the training to doing anything remotely as complex as this project.

Thank you in advance

I ramble on.........
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Bob P · Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 1:30 am Post subject:

thanks for your feedback. this is really a support question, so i'll answer this in the support thread. :wink:

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Stage 1/3 | Jackass! | Rockhopper! | Thanks | Google Sucks

Bob P · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2005 7:47 pm Post subject:

New Thread started for Jackass! 2005.1 Development
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Stage 1/3 | Jackass! | Rockhopper! | Thanks | Google Sucks